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CFP: Shirking the Canon: “Obscure” or “Unpopular” Texts in the Survey Classroom
54th International Congress on Medieval Studies
Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI
9-12 May 2019
Paper Panel: “Langland’s Library”
This seminar explores how Europeans constructed the identities of non-European and non-Christian peoples in the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds. We invite papers that examine how Europeans racialized, sexualized, or in any way “othered” either Jews or Muslims in Southern Europe, the indigenous peoples of the Americas, or the peoples of North/West Africa that they encountered in Africa in addition to those encountered as slaves when traveling to the Caribbean and Central America. Renaissance and early modern European views of different peoples was closely connected to, and constructed by, prevailing ideas about gender and sexuality as well as notions of civilization and nature.
What was medieval style?
The Outlaw Corpus and the Fight for Justice: Medieval Outlaw Narratives in Modern Form
This cfp is for a round table for The Twelfth Biennial Conference of the International Association for Robin Hood Studies, to be held at the University of Montevallo (Montevallo, AL) from 14-17 May 2019. The theme of the conference is “Outlaw Bodies.”
PCDP 2019: Fairies and the Fantastic
February 22-23, 2019
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/DoctorVirtualis/index
The most fundamental question from which this journal’s number arise is the following: is it possible to compare the specific attitude of a line of medieval mysticism thought with some aspects of contemporary thought? Which are important in particular?
A first element concerns the typical model of monastic reflection of the 12th century, in which the mystical perspective, with a strongly metaphorical language, drafts a cognitive itinerary in which the subject assimilates itself to the known object (dynamics that is illustrated with the analogy of the relationship between the lover and the loved).
This session at the 2019 International Congress on Medieval Studies examines the many valences of wounds in late medieval Christianity, focusing on themes surrounding wounds and wounding both visible (corporeal and/or material) and invisible (rhetorical and allegorical). The image of the wounded body held a central place in late medieval Christian practice and material culture; the wounds of the crucified Christ were tangible reminders of his Passion and served as foci of veneration, while stigmatic saints and maimed martyrs were marked as holy by means of bodily trauma.
Scholars agree that English and French, whether language, literature, or culture, had a strong relationship in the Middle Ages. Despite their mutual interactions and back-and-forth distribution of power, the portrayal of the relationship has remained fairly static, frequently described as French influence on English writing but not the other way around. Rather than a unidirectional influence, however, we should perhaps consider the relationship to be one of exchange. How might English ideas have influenced French ones? How might both peoples have viewed each other on a day-to-day level?
In a letter to his friend Axel Kaun, Samuel Beckett once described the “terrible materiality of the word surface” that faces every writer as they set pen to page. Their goal, Beckett claims, is to puncture this surface, boring holes into the word so that a different materiality “lurking behind” it might seep through. When the word is filled with holes, when what is said is ineffable and indescribable, it is no longer subordinated to its representative function. Rather, the word reveals its own sense and sensuousness, its materiality entirely distinct from that of its referent. The “sounding of impossible bodies” of the voices of the dead in M.